On December 14, 2024, members from AYLUS Oakland Gardens volunteered at Weeping Beech Park from 9 AM to 12 PM for our 133rd event. During this event, we partnered with Maureen Regan again and worked with Frank from Green Earth Urban Gardens, NYC Parks employee Mattia, and other volunteers at the park. During this event, we mulched, gathered leaves, and picked up trash around the park.
Maureen Regan has over 14 years of experience working in the community. She serves as a Co-Chair of the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground Conservancy, a historical cemetery where we have volunteered. She also has extensive horticultural knowledge as the founder of Green Earth Urban Gardens Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to farming and green spaces within the city. She has been an ardent supporter of our branch and has always been willing to work with us. Before the start of the event, she generously provided us with donuts, munchkins, bagels, hot chocolate, coffee, and other snacks. We sincerely thank her for giving us food and drinks for the event, and we are grateful that she has always gone out of her way to ensure our safety and welfare whenever we have worked with her. She serves as an inspiration to all and demonstrates that anyone, including you, can make a change in their communities. Words cannot express our gratitude for your partnership with our branch and your years of work in the community.
For this event, NYC Parks employee Mattia provided us with tools such as shovels, pitchforks, rakes, brooms, leaf scoppers, and trash pickers as well as bags and wheelbarrows. Our high school members were in charge of mulching the garden beds. Some of them worked on shoveling mulch from a mulch pile into our wheelbarrows, which were then taken to the garden beds. To lift the wheelbarrows over the fences of the garden beds, some of us stood inside the garden beds to help lift the wheelbarrow and dump in the mulch, which we subsequently spread out across the garden beds using our rakes and pitchforks. The wheelbarrows were then taken back to the pile to be filled with mulch again, allowing the cycle to repeat. We also used brooms to sweep in any mulch near the edges of the garden beds.
The rest of our members either focused on removing trash around the park using trash grabbers and garbage bags, or picking up the leaves that had fallen on the ground using leaf scoppers and putting them into bags. When our high schoolers were done mulching, they also helped out with cleaning up trash and gathering leaves. By the end of the event, we had spread out all of the mulch, filled up many bags full of leaves, and removed large amounts of trash. When we wrapped up our event, we made sure to look around the park to ensure that we did not leave any tools behind.
After the event, Maureen Regan told us about the importance of what we were doing. She informed us that the bags of leaves will be taken by the Park Departments and turned into compost. This way, they do not go to waste and can be used to help plant more plants. She informed us that the world is running out of topsoil and that mulch helps to preserve the topsoil during the winter. Mulch also has many other purposes, including providing nutrients, helping the soil retain moisture, preventing weeds, and regulating temperatures. She also expressed her gratitude for our volunteer work over the past year. Thank you too, Maureen!
Not only does the park serve an important environmental purpose, it also has an important historical purpose. The namesake of the park is a weeping beech that was the mother of all weeping beeches in the United States. First introduced to the site by landscape architect Samuel Parsons, the weeping beech lived for over 150 years and was once over 60 feet tall. A cross-section of the tree was replanted and still stands there to this day. Weeping Beech Park is located along the Liberty Trail, a trail containing many important buildings from history including the Flushing Town Hall, the Friends Meeting House, the Fox Stone, the Bowne House, and the Lewis Latimer House Museum. We are grateful to have the opportunity to volunteer in a place with such great historical importance, and it goes to show the importance of parks and why it is important to volunteer in them.
Once again, thank you so much to all of our volunteers and members of our parent advisor team who showed up despite the cold weather! A big thank you to Mattia, the rest of the NYC Parks Department, Frank, and of course, Maureen Regan. The dedication to community service from all of you over the past year is admirable, and the parks are better off because of it! Thank you for allowing us to collaborate with you, and while this will be our branch’s last event for the year, we eagerly look forward to working with you in the future!
Our Volunteers:
Jia Qi Liu (Angela) : 3 hours
Hong Hao Liu (Alfred) : 3 hours
Ioklee Lin : 3 hours
Ioknor Lin : 3 hours
Kaden He : 3 hours
Eric Zheng : 3 hours
Evan Li : 3 hours
Stephanie ShiRan You : 3 hours
Bowen Chen : 3 hours
Steven Zhu : 3 hours
Rex He : 3 hours
Alex Lu : 3 hours
Patrick Guan : 3 hours
Justin Cheong : 3 hours
Yuhan Lin : 3 hours
Eason Lin : 3 hours
Kaisa Wu : 3 hours
Anthony Lin : 3 hours
Vicky Liu : 3 hours
Queenie Qiu : 3 hours
Emerson Chen : 3 hours
Junlong Mei : 3 hours
Opal Tsai : 3 hours
Amber Tsai : 3 hours
Lucas Yuan : 3 hours
Orion Zheng : 3 hours
Tian Zhu Xie : 3 hours
Yuyan Fan : 3 hours
Tyler Siegel : 3 hours
Cindy Siegel : 3 hours
Aiden Lin : 3 hours
Brandon Lin : 3 hours
Luke Chen : 3 hours
Henry Jiang : 3 hours
Adrian Jiang : 3 hours
Sophia Xu : 3 hours
Anthony Xu : 3 hours
Ian Lee : 3 hours
Elina Lee : 3 hours
Albert Tang : 3 hours
Ryan Wu : 3 hours
Jierui Liu: 2.5 hours
Parent Adviser Team:
Teng Fei Liu: 4 hours
Hsinhui Liao: 4 hours
Cui Fang Li: 4 hours
Report written by: Anthony Lin
Reviewed by: Jia Qi (Angela) Liu
